lural of il and lo, and le is the plural of la. You use these plural definite articles when you are talking about several specific members of a group - i tavoli means the tables. There are no plural forms of uno and una, and to translate some when used in sentences, one must use indeterminate pronouns - dei tavoli means some tables. Note however that for uncountables nouns, where English uses no article (Wine is red), Italian will use an article (Il vino e' rosso).

　　You may wonder why there are two forms for the masculine articles (il and lo, and their plurals i and gli, as well as un and uno). The first form is used when a noun begins with a consonant (il telefono), the second form is used when a noun begins with a vowel (un Italiano), or with s followed by a consonant, or with z, gn, ps or x. As a further complication, if a (masculine or feminine) noun begins with a vowel, the articles lo and la) are not written in full form (Lo Italiano, the Italian man, or Italian language) unless a new line starts across the two words, but in abbreviated form (L'Italiano) separated by an apostrophe. The apostrophe means something has been elided (left out). Even trickier (but this is how one recognizes who knows Italian !), with indefinite articles, the apostrophe is needed only for the feminine form (since for the masculine one REPLACES uno with un which is a valid existing form, thus : un Italiano (an Italian man) but un'Italiana (an Italian woman).

　　Here are some examples using th